2021 Volnay Village

“My uncle has retired,” Dominique Lafon’s nephew Pierre tells me before we start tasting, to which I rejoinder. “What kind of retirement? There’s retiring, and there’s retiring.” As I expected, Dominique Lafon is not bronzing on a sun lounger in the Costa del Sol and soon holds court down in the cellar. We even nip over to the crush facility in Bligny to taste his négociant wine under his name, which has always remained in the shadow of Domaine des Comte Lafon. He’ll devote more time to this side project as he keeps a respectful distance and gives Pierre and his daughter Léa the space to put their stamp on one of the most famous estates in the Côte d’Or, dropping in once every couple of weeks. (Readers can find reviews of those 2021s under “Dominique Lafon” in this report.)

Back to the Domaine, Lafon tells me that 2021 was the most challenging vintage he had ever seen. But Pierre gives me the lowdown… “It was a complicated growing season with the frost, when we lost two-thirds of the crop, mostly in the Premier Crus on the slopes like Les Perrières and Genevrières. We didn’t prune late, like in 2022. It’s something we are looking at. Afterward, it was rainy with a cooler summer. There were few sunny days, and the ground was always wet, so we could not go out in the tractor to spray. But the grapes were in pretty good condition, and we only had one parcel of Meursault to sort at harvest. We picked between 17 and 27 September. We were lucky because we only had one day of rain.” Léa Lafon tells me: “We thought conditions would be awful, but they weren’t bad at all. Altogether, we were worn out by the year. When you pick in August, everything is so fast, but in September, things go more slowly as there is less sun, so waiting a day doesn’t make much difference. Most of the whites and Volnay were picked before the rain. The fermentation went very smoothly, and there wasn’t so much work in the cellar as the volume was so small. The malo took some time as the cellar was quite cold, some cuvées finishing in February or March. We used no new barrels in 2021, the same as in 2016, and just used one-year-old barrels. When you have a small volume in small tanks, you can get a bit of oxidation, so we might bottle a bit earlier.”

These are impressive wines, crowned by a superlative Meursault Les Perrières that dares to outshine the Montrachet, though as Dominique Lafon mentions, they could switch the following week. Quantities are severely depleted - good luck trying to find the measly 450-odd bottles of Genevrières, yet terroirs shine through, just one or two cuvées missing their usual elan. There is no Volnay Village this year, though the Premier Crus are well worth seeking out and are surfeit with crunchy red berry fruit.